


Hi Alexi :)

by richiesspaghetti



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:54:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23723416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/richiesspaghetti/pseuds/richiesspaghetti





	Hi Alexi :)

“Life Is Continuing, Life Is Continuing” 

I am the type of individual who strongly believes in the universe as a divine power. Growing up Southern Baptist, punishment was used a deterrent, both in the sense of keeping me godly and keeping me in line at home, in school, wherever. I believe in psychology this is referred to as “operant conditioning” and this particular mode of it is generally frowned upon in terms of ethical effectiveness. Needless to say, I soon took my leave from the church around eighth grade. 

I have always had an intrinsic desire to find meaning in the world around me. I was an inquisitive child, and religion did not cut it for me the way it seemed to do for the people around me. I was much more interested in the life inhabiting the universe than the rules and philosophical platitudes established by a being that had no absolute existence; Sunday school was a drag to me, and the Biblical stories felt like just that – stories, to which I had no deeper inclination than one does to the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. Growing older, it became apparent to me why I did not like the concept of one singular monotheistic religion preaching to me that it was the only “right” one – it felt hypocritical, to me, for a religion that preaches love and acceptance to claim that all who did not accept The Lord And Savior Jesus Christ as their one true deity. If we were all the same, created equally, and given free will, then why did something like this matter? The Christianity I had encountered seemed to believe itself more worthy than anything else in the world, bringing the Confucian quote to mind: “By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.” 1 

This was the groundwork laid in my early years that ultimately led me to discovering Transcendentalism, or Kantian philosophy. Of course, it was aided by my discovery of Walt Whitman, who has been my very favorite poet since I had my own private revolution at the age of seventeen. Recalling my previous confession of leaving the church in eighth grade, this leaves a period of close to three years between my loss of faith and reformation of faith – between these two periods of my life, I went through many mass transformations, as one does in early high school. At first I decided I most aligned with atheism, then agnosticism, then I got really into Eastern religions like Buddhism and Confucianism; these, admittedly, did not hold much for me, though even now I would say that Buddhism is rather close to my beliefs system. My issue lay within the fact that I felt the presence of a higher power2, but it wasn’t the godly figure I had grown up knowing. There was no system of right or wrong that everyone had to follow uniformly; there were no creeds or commandments, no punishments in the life hereafter. There was not forgiveness, because for forgiveness to exist there must be rules with the option of being broken. Attempting to navigate this as a young teen was difficult; I didn’t have the necessary tools to explore this mindset as I would later on, especially in college. I settled on labeling myself as “undecided” and went along with my merry little life, free from the confines of organized religion. 

After graduating high school, I had the means to set out and explore my faith more freely. I had Whitman in my heart’s pocket, able to fish out a line and read it for comfort as one does stories in the Bible; “Song of Myself” had become my John 3:16, a personal reminder that we are all existing evenly on the expansive plane of mortality and the world around us, side by side with each other, the plants, the animals. My journey had sprouted, however, from more than just this belief; I was beginning to take part in practices like tarot reading, palmistry, astrology, and numerology, things I now consider myself to be a practitioner of. I have always held a great sense of intuition about me, and I discovered that I could use this uncanny sixth sense as a tool to help divine what the Universe held for me, to answer questions I had regarding my self-navigation of the world. Now, as someone who regularly reads cards and birth charts for both friends and myself, I look back and am terrifically amused at the past; as a child I was obsessed with the concept of astrology and the mysticism within fortune-reading, but was always told that these things were Satanic and would lead me down a path of eternal punishment3. 

What did I gain from all of this? If I were to describe to you the ways in which my life has improved upon this discovery of myself, we would surely be here all day, and maybe even longer. I have learned to let go of things I cannot control and to let the natural order of the Universe take over; I have learned from watching the rivers and streams and hearing the soft morning song of the birds in their trees that time waits for no one, so why should I be concerned with what I cannot change?4. Life is continuing forever onward, with or without me, with no regards to my fruitless anxieties. Life is something to savor; to paraphrase Thoreau, we should be concerned with sucking the marrow from life instead of busying ourselves with the needless fears we have of the unknown or inevitable5. Among the divine knowledge of how to let go, I have also learned to love wholly and without restriction, mainly from the poetry of people like Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Walt Whitman, et cetera et cetera. I am happier now than I was under the thumb of a god I had never known so intimately as I know nature and her primal sanities, as Whitman once coined a phrase. 

Does this make me a bleeding-heart hippie? Very well then. I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. I consider myself an old soul, one with an insatiable need for a full heart and clear mind. This journey out of the Christian religion has opened my eyes to a whole world beyond me, quite literally. I no longer feel the need to prove myself to those around me, and there is an impossibly deep connection between the well of my soul and the infinite beyond, the ever-expansive arms of the Universe. Where I once feared I now love; where there was apprehension there is now excited expectation, and exaltation within the awe-inspiring movement of the Universe in this life and the lives hereafter that our souls will live ad infinitum.


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